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Episode 132 – “The Tenth Planet” – Part 02

So the Cybermen have arrived! That great, terrible menace that…ok, let’s be honest. They just look goofy in their first appearance. So much so that it’s amazing they had a second.

#itgetsbetter

As I sit to watch this, I realize that it’s really the last surviving Hartnell episode. Oh, he’s glimpsed briefly in the regeneration clip, and he comes back in “The Three Doctors”, but really…this is it, since he’s not in the next episode.

There’s a newcaster who says something about there not being a consensus on the fact that the landmasses on Mondas look the same as the Earth. Because…astronomers are idiots? It’s just a stupid line.

The Cybermen arrive, wearing cunning cloaks. They get revealed and the Cyberman music that comes into play in “Tomb of the Cyberman’ shows up. I’ve always liked that bit of music.

Much as I hate the extra-dimensional Cybermen that turned up in the 10th Doctor’s era, I gotta admit that the Mondas origin is just stupid. Another planet, orbiting on the same path, but more technologically advanced, and looking exactly the same as the Earth, but upside-down. How fucking dumb is that shit? I’m glad it gets barely mentioned later on.

It’s also kind of odd that this massive news event in late 1986 also never gets mentioned later on. But that’s just that stupid thing this show has of, “Oh, humans forget things all the time!”

I do like the Cyberman voices in this story. They’re sometimes a little hard to understand, but nowhere near as bad as what happened later on, and it is nice to have a somewhat alien inflection.

Meantime, up in space, Bernie Casey and his copilot are having a bad time of it. Or at least they are until their ship explodes, so that’s fun. We then have a “hilarious in hindsight” bit where Ben is criticizing a screwdriver for being useless.

He sets up a trap to blind a Cyberman using a movie projector. He does this and then takes the Cyberman’s weapon. Not bad.

Then back to the Cybermen, intoning, “You will become like us.” So basically we have the Borg well before the Borg. We also learn that the Cybermen don’t care about anyone other than themselves. Oh, they’re objectivists. Now I get it.